It’s a tense stand-off as Melvyn Bragg raps John Humphrys

Broadcaster Melvyn Bragg has hit back at rival John Humphrys over criticisms of the use of the English language in his flagship Radio 4 show.

Humphrys said the common use of the historic present tense on Bragg’s In Our Time programme gave an “entirely bogus sense of immediacy” and was “irritating” and “pretentious”.

But Lord Bragg responded with a passionate defence of the language used and of his guest contributors, and issued his own light-hearted warning: “It is a dagger to the heart being attacked by John. And I’m sharpening my own dagger for when we come back in September.”

Today presenter Humphrys, who has written a book, Lost For Words, on “the mangling and manipulating of English”, had told Radio 4’s Broadcasting House programme that other people including writer Matthew Parris from The Times were “as one in opposition to Melvyn Bragg on the use of the historic present”.

Rival: John John Humphrys (Picture: BBC)

But Lord Bragg said he was not aware he even used the tense — “I don’t like it personally, but then I don’t like change. I don’t like the way ‘wicked’ has changed its meaning from ‘bad and evil’ to ‘good and delightful’.”He said one of the characteristics that made English a global language and kept it alive was the fact it was constantly changing.

He added that academics on his show who did use the historic present tense did so believing that it brought their subject matter to life — and he was not going to act like “some lollipop man” holding up his hand to stop them.

“I don’t think that’s my job to tell somebody at the top of their game in scholarship to stop using that tense,” he said. “Some academics who use it do so because they find it more vivid and they find it more exciting.”

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Despite his own dislike of the usage, Lord Bragg pointed out language was constantly evolving and even the Oxford English Dictionary now allowed examples of street language.

He said to fight against it would be as futile as the efforts of Gulliver’s Travels writer Jonathan Swift, who tried to set up an academy to “freeze” English as it was three centuries ago because he feared future generations would find it as difficult to read him as he found Chaucer. Bragg added: “He failed and these efforts will always fail.”

Humphrys, speaking on Broadcasting House, had singled out a trailer for a Radio 4 programme on the First World War which referred to British intelligence at the time and said “how haphazard and ramshackle the whole thing is”.

“What’s wrong with the past tense?” asked Humphrys. “It tells us what happened in the past.”